Maxwell Davidson Gallery presents, C0DE, a solo exhibition of new work by Pedro S. de Movellán. This exhibition features outdoor work on the terraces, indoor works on the tenth floor, and a large-scale installation on the gallery’s ninth floor.

The exhibition title refers to de Movellán’s own aesthetic language, the common thread that links his works – each wholly unique – into a cohesive series, and which is visible within the greater arc of his career. Secondly, the genetic code that makes us all who we are is particularly pertinent in de Movellán’s case. The son of an architect and an abstract painter, de Movellan makes work that reflects that unique pairing in his unrivaled combination of precision form and artistic sensibility. Finally, Code references the digital language that the artist taught himself in order to help program his large installation.

This installation will be de Movellán’s largest and most complex indoor work to date. Hanging from the ceiling, the installation uses unique computer coding programmed by the artist to operate the fans and lights that accompany the sculptural elements. The work is entirely self-sufficient, made to both generate and define motion. In this case, the LED lights add to the sensation of randomness, both in their chaotic travel attached to the elements, and in their precisely written programming. It serves as the first in a future series in which de Movellán will work more with light control and its cooperation with motion, combining his mastery of the analog world of sculpture with the continually advancing digital realm.

For nearly 25 years, de Movellán has proven himself as one of the most talented and progressive kinetic sculptors in the world. This exhibition is de Movellán’s twelfth with the gallery. The artist lives and works in West Stockbridge, MA.

Casey Kaplan is pleased to announce Trade Winds, our first solo exhibition with Hugh Scott-Douglas, featuring a new series of UV cured inkjet and resin printed canvases and a recent digital video work. Scott-Douglas works from a studio space in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, an urban industrial park with a long varied history of changing roles ranging from naval shipyard to film studio lot. Reflecting on this environment, he began researching the global shipping trade and found a mapping software able to track all thoroughfare of sea transport. Utilizing the capabilities of the program in a manner different from the software’s intent, Scott-Douglas isolates the environmental conditions in each location – which appear as real-time graphemes of lines, arrows, and triangles – by removing all of the boats from the water. Specific to current, wind, and wave directions, these symbols are mapping the shifting conditions of the various trade routes, and become the basis of his artworks in layers of printed ink and resin.

Throughout Scott-Douglas’s practice are motifs concerning an interest in systems of value, and the deconstruction of protocols and symbols. This can be seen in his previous series, such as: Chopped Bills and Torn Cheques (2013-2014), his folded billboard sculptures (2014) and a set of prints derived from the interior workings of watches in 2015. With his latest body of work, Scott-Douglas approaches similar queries.

Guided by a composite image of a thousand global satellites, each composition is an abstraction representing a different commercial shipping route. The individual artwork’s titles, such as Bossa Nova (a journey from Salvador, Brazil to Tangier, Morocco) refer to the names of these naval thoroughfares. The artworks are created by zooming in on a specific oceanic area and removing the naval vessels from the coded mapping system. In a multi-phase process, the artist creates aerial maps with their own individual color schemes. Then with the aid of an industrial printer, a process akin to silkscreening is employed to render each image in its layers where current, wind, and wave directions are frozen, one on top of the next, as if time has collapsed into a perpetual present.

Alongside the canvas prints, Scott-Douglas presents Shudder, a 2-minute looped, digital video that considers the measurement of an amorphous form, air. With a camera attached on top of an air compressor and aimed at the artist’s studio floor, the compressor is activated and begins to shake aggressively, creating wild gestures within the frame. Filmed also from an aerial perspective, what is experienced is the compressor filling with air in order to reach full pressure. When the compressor reaches its capacity and stops intaking air, the camera for a moment becomes still. In those few final seconds, the viewer can clearly see Scott-Douglas’ studio floor before the cycle repeats and the image becomes amorphous again. From hypnotic blur to splattered studio floor, the video documents the transition of nebulous air into controlled and measured units and imparts a tangibility to that which often goes unnoticed.

DOOSAN Gallery New York is pleased to announce Eunsil Lee’s solo exhibition, Perfectly Matched from November 17th through December 29th, 2016.

Eunsil Lee explores humanity’s often duplicitous and contradictory attitudes in regards to desires that are marked as taboos in society through her art. In these works, Lee uses hanji, a Korean paper made from mulberry trees, a common material often used in traditional Asian art. She takes many sheets of the paper and thickly layers them together, then piles on mineral pigments onto the paper using a small brush.

The magnum opus of this exhibition Desire, depicts a landscape with a tiger with his genitals flushed and a bleeding deer who is looking at the tiger. This image shows the hypocritical social construct within sexuality of the stronger and the weaker figure. Also, Lee has placed the architecture of the Korean house in the composition in between the scene and the viewer, thereby separating the viewer in order that their perspective would be one of voyeurism.

This exhibition signals the continuation of DOOSAN Gallery New York’s commitment to introducing Korean contemporary painting to the United States audience, affording viewers here the opportunity to consider and think about its potentiality within the realm of contemporary art.

Raw textures and polished forms - the familiar made new again through approach and context - the new visionary. In breadth and scope the exhibition represents the current stage of Martin’s artistic practice - an exploration of structure, form and medium with a focus on the human figure. Martin functions as both artist and anthropologist, as people are her dominant subject: she poignantly interprets the human spirit with flair that is all her own. JoAnne Artman Gallery is pleased to present America Martin.

AMERICA MARTIN (b. 1980, Los Angeles, CA) is a Colombian-American fine artist based in Los Angeles, California who utilizes the human form as the primary subject in her work. In her figurative paintings she adheres to the most fundamental aspect of drawing - the line - to tell a story, connecting compositional elements and drawing the figure out of the blocked areas of color. With unapologetic strokes and a bold palette America’s forms hum with the vitality and vigor of the world around her. Martin’s body of work encompasses a variety of mediums ranging from painting to compositions on cotton rag paper, as well as powder coated steel sculpture.

Influences of her Colombian heritage, classicism, and modernist aesthetics both inform and characterize her distinctive style, which is both a humanist investigation and evocation of the relationship between the human form and the natural world. In her work, the figure often exists in harmony with natural elements, intimate in composition with flowers, plants or animals. At other times the figure becomes a vehicle - a symbolic icon in an exploration of the scope and potential of the medium. With her constantly evolving mastery of technique, form, and medium, Martin’s work goes beyond the expected.

America Martin’s work will inspire, provoke, engage and mesmerize. With visual perceptions always changing, peek behind the stories told and you're sure to find the right artistic expression!

(New York-October 28, 2016) To coincide with the presidential election, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery presents Benny Andrews: The Bicentennial Series – the gallery’s second solo exhibition featuring the work of Benny Andrews (American, 1930-2006). This exhibition will consist of paintings and drawings from all six individual subseries – Symbols, Trash, Circle, Sexism, War and Utopia - which in their totality comprise The Bicentennial Series.

Completed between 1970 to 1975, The Bicentennial Series was conceived to reveal one Black Americans view of the United States at a time when the country was celebrating a milestone and feeling nostalgic. Fearing that black Americans would be invisible from all Bicentennial narratives and celebrations, Benny Andrews devoted himself to sharing his “feelings and impressions of this place–America.” By completing six distinctive groups of works (monumental-scale paintings and drawings) with themes that include southern rituals, oppression, justice/injustice, incarceration, regeneration, war, inequality, technology, feminism, motherhood, the absence of humanity, fantasy and idealized beauty, Andrews raised a consciousness. Holding deeply to his southern roots and masterfully crafting timeless allegories, Andrews revealed American truths that are today as relevant as they were 40 years ago.

This exhibition will be the first opportunity to see work from all six subseries together; the majority of works have never been exhibited publicly. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated color catalogue with an essay by Pellom McDaniels III, Ph.D., Curator of African American collections in the Stuart A. Rose Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Library at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. In his essay, McDaniels writes:
The Bicentennial Series provided Andrews a unique opportunity to examine America as he saw it. His overall program included redefining the position of black artists within the realm of contemporary art while advancing an understanding of people of African descent as integral to the history of the United States. Indeed, in the post-civil-rights era of the 1970s, whereby black people had achieved the designated outcome of full-citizenship rights through the discourse of social movements, Andrews’s use of art and art production as a tool of resistance and reinforcement of the narratives that mattered to “the folks” is significant. Through his art, Andrews was able to communicate and frame the contributions made by the Black church to ground black communities, the significance of black women to the communities they fostered and cared for, and the vulnerability of the oppressed in an ostensibly democratic system that had been founded in support of white supremacy.

Benny Andrews (1930-2006) was born in rural Georgia and devoted his career to championing African Americans and their stories. In 1948, Andrews graduated from high school and with a 4-H Club scholarship enrolled in Georgia’s Fort Valley State College. He joined the United States Air Force, served in the Korean War, and attained the rank of staff sergeant before receiving an honorable discharge in 1954. With funding from the GI Bill, Andrews enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1958, he completed his bachelor of fine arts degree and moved to New York City.

In New York, Andrews lived on Suffolk Street, befriended other Lower East Side figurative expressionists that included Red Grooms, Bob Thompson, Lester Johnson and Nam June Paik, and continued to develop his “rough collage” technique that often combined rugged scraps of paper and cloth with paint on canvas. As Andrews explained, “I started working with collage because I found oil paint so sophisticated, and I didn’t want to lose my sense of rawness.” By the 1960s, Andrews mastered this technique, and in 1962, Bella Fishko invited Andrews to become a member of Forum Gallery, which gave him his first New York solo exhibition. Additional solo exhibitions followed there in 1964 and 1966. In 1965, with funding from a John Hay Whitney Fellowship, Andrews traveled home to Georgia and began working on his Autobiographical Series. In 1971, The Studio Museum in Harlem presented the first works completed of The Bicentennial Series. In 1975, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta presented four subseries from The Bicentennial Series; the exhibition traveled to the Herbert F. Johnson Museum in Ithaca, NY and the National Center of Afro-American Artists in Boston.

A self-described “people’s painter,” Andrews focused on figurative social commentary depicting the struggles, atrocities, and everyday occurrences in the world, but he was not satisfied to use art as a substitute for action. In 1968, he began a career at Queens College, City University of New York, where he was part of the college’s SEEK (Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge) program, designed to help students from underserved areas prepare for college. In 1969, he became a founding member of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC), which formed coalitions with other artists’ groups, protested the exclusion of women and men of color from institutional and historical canons, and advocated for greater representation of black artists, curators, and intellectuals within major museums. Together with Jay Milder, Peter Passuntino, Nicholas Sperakis, Peter Dean, Michael Fauerbach, Bill Barrell, Leonel Gongora, and Ken Bowman, Andrews participates in the founding of the Rhino Horn Group. In 1971, the art classes Andrews had been teaching at the Manhattan Detention Complex (“the Tombs”) became the cornerstone of a major prison art program initiated under the auspices of the BECC that expanded across the country. In 1976, he became the art coordinator for the Inner City Roundtable of Youths (ICRY)—an organization comprised of gang members in the New York metropolitan area who seek to combat youth violence by strengthening urban communities. From 1982 to 1984, he directed the Visual Arts Program, a division of the National Endowment for the Arts (1982-84), and in 1997, Andrews became a member of the National Academy of Design. Shortly before his death in 2006, Andrews was working on a project in the Gulf Coast with children displaced by Hurricane Katrina. In 2002, the Benny Andrews Foundation was established to help emerging artists gain greater recognition and to encourage artists to donate their work to historically black museums. Andrews work is represented in over fifty public collections including the Detroit Institute of Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY), The Museum of Modern Art (NY), Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC), The Studio Museum in Harlem (NY), and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (Hartford, CT).

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery represents the Estate of Benny Andrews and this exhibition has been organized with their cooperation.

SPECIAL EVENT
In conjunction with this exhibition, dynamic saxophonist, composer, improviser and mixed media sound conceptualist Matana Roberts will perform live at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery on Saturday, November 12 @ 4:00pm (Reservations required: rsvp@michaelrosenfeldart.com); Roberts presents a conceptual acoustic sound quilt for brass choir, titled …it’s all a damn game. Her performance is a response to Andrews’ masterpiece Circle (1971), included in the exhibition.

The Pace Gallery is honored to present Rothko: Dark Palette, an exhibition tracing the history of Mark Rothko’s use of dark colors in his sectional paintings. It will be on view at 510 West 25th Street from November 4, 2016 through January 7, 2017.

The exhibition reveals the development of Rothko’s expressive use of color from 1955 through the 1960s. Presented in association with the Rothko family, Dark Palette will feature loans from museum collections including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, and will be accompanied by a hardcover book with writings by Mark Rothko, his son Christopher, and an introduction by Arne Glimcher.

Senior & Shopmaker is pleased to present Polly Apfelbaum: Atomic Mystic Portraits, an exhibition of the artist’s recent monoprints and woodblock prints produced in collaboration with her longtime publisher, Durham Press. In her fabric sculptures, installations, ceramics, and works on paper, Apfelbaum explores complex formal and chromatic relationships, pushing the canon of modernist abstraction in decidedly original directions. Her work is steeped in references to feminism, women's work, craft, and fashion, and in particular the cultural associations inherent in pattern and design.

A recipient of the Rome Prize in 2013-14, Apfelbaum’s Italian visit led to a fascination with the drapery and colored fabrics depicted in Renaissance and Baroque paintings. The fluorescent color of her Byzantine Rocker series is achieved by Apfelbaum’s employment of the split fountain or “rainbow roll” technique, in which multiple colors are partially mixed to achieve a continuous gradient effect. The technique appears again but in smaller segments in works such as Mosaic Mile, a large-scale monoprint inspired by decorative inlay mosaic floors typical of medieval Italian architecture. The “Cosmati” technique entailed elaborate inlays of small triangles and rectangles of colored stones. In Apfelbaum’s work, the effect is crafted from a lexicon of 1500 hand-laid, mosaic-like blocks which are inked and printed in different combinations on heavy handmade paper. The dazzling color and pattern of her new series, Atomic Mystic Portraits and Atomic Mystic Puzzles, are studies in the formal relationship of parts to the whole.

Born in 1955 in Abingdon, Pennsylvania, Polly Apfelbaum resides in New York. Her solo exhibition Face (Geometry) Naked (Eyes) is on view at the Ben Maltz Gallery, OTIS College of Arts and Design, Los Angeles, CA through December 4, 2016. Her work is included in the collections of the Perez Art Museum, Miami; Museum of Modern of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of Art of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; and Musée D’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, among others.

New York NY … Beginning 10 November 2016, Hauser & Wirth is pleased to present ‘Raw Spinoffs Continuations’, an exhibition of sculptures by Paul McCarthy. Featuring works from the artist’s most important projects of the last 15 years, including ‘WS’, ‘Caribbean Pirates’, and ‘Pig Island’, ‘Raw Spinoffs Continuations’ celebrates McCarthy’s distinctive process in the making and un-making of an artwork.

About the Exhibition
Hauser & Wirth will present a new series by McCarthy of bronze ‘White Snow Dwarfs’ alongside the original clay sculptures from which they were cast. These most recent works in the artist’s major ongoing project ‘White Snow’ vividly illustrate the roles that repetition and variation play in his oeuvre. McCarthy’s 2013 video installation at the Park Avenue Armory ‘White Snow’ is the modern interpretation of Walt Disney’s beloved 1937 animated classic film ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’, in which the original stories’ archetypal narratives are pitched against real human drives and desires.

McCarthy’s original sculpted clay dwarves were altered and distorted variations of Disney’s Seven Dwarfs. Even in their original iterations, McCarthy’s clay figures possessed additional layers of abstraction as a result of having been sculpted and re-sculpted via the artist’s frantic and impulsive performative process. They were subsequently cast in silicone (2010 – 2012), and although those richly colored versions are not included in ‘Raw Spinoffs Continuations’, they are integral manifestations of the journey that has produced this remarkable body of work to date. The process of silicone casting abstracted the original clay sculptures further, so that a second casting in bronze have acquired a new degree of rawness and pathos. Presented en masse, McCarthy’s bronze and clay dwarves reveal the artist‘s engagement with the life cycles of materials and together elicit meditations upon time, mortality, and the role of art in a realm of thought beyond the limits of flesh.

Also on view in the exhibition will be the large-scale installation ‘Chop Chop, Chopper, Amputation’ (2013 – 2016) from McCarthy’s Caribbean Pirates series. In this darkly carnivalesque work, a pair of disjoined clay figures wearing huge pirate hats, loom over a landscape littered with broken body casts, chairs, wooden platforms, sex toys, buckets, mugs, among other detritus, all punctuated by dollops of viscous, deep yellow polyurethane foam. Inspired by the Disneyland attraction ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’, the Caribbean Pirates project began in 2001 as a collaboration between Paul McCarthy and his son Damon McCarthy; it has produced a prodigious body of work, including sculptures, performance, and film. ‘Chop Chop, Chopper, Amputation’ is the merging of a pair of individual large-scale works in the series, based on two drawings by McCarthy – ‘Chopper’ and ‘Amputation’ – that were originally intended to stand independently from one another. Envisioned as a pirate boat, the installation rests on carpets that stand in for water filled with debris: the trash that has been thrown overboard by the vessel’s unruly occupants.

Along with ‘Chop Chop, Chopper, Amputation’, the exhibition includes ‘Amputation (AMP), Blue Fiberglass’ (2013 – 2016), a blue fiberglass cast of ‘Amputation’ never before exhibited. ‘Chop Chop, Chopper, Amputation’ will have changed from previous showings due to the process of removing ‘Amputation’ from the larger work in order to mold and cast the blue fiberglass iteration. As with the clay dwarf sculptures, ‘Amputation’ has undergone a separate journey and further abstraction in McCarthy’s endless loop of action.

The exhibition will be completed by ‘Paula Jones’ (2005 – 2008) and ‘Puppet’ (2005 – 2008), both born out of McCarthy’s mammoth, celebrated opus ‘Pig Island’ (2005 – 2010). Combining political figures and elements drawn from pop culture, ‘Pig Island’ evolved over seven years in the artist’s studio, ultimately becoming a surreal compilation of themes that have coursed through McCarthy’s work for decades. Originally conceptualized as an island of robotic pirates and pigs, drawing inspiration from the earlier ‘Piccadilly Circus’ (2003), ‘Pig Island’ is populated by pirates, pigs, likenesses of George W. Bush and Angelina Jolie, an assortment of Disney characters, and the artist himself, all carousing in a state of reckless abandon. Originally part of this dark bacchanal, the sculptures ‘Puppet’ and ‘Paula Jones’ feature caricatures of former President George W. Bush and pot-bellied pigs engaged in sexual acts.

On view through 14 January 2017, ‘Raw Spinoffs Continuations’ will be the final exhibition at Hauser & Wirth’s West 18th Street space. The gallery’s new temporary home is 548 West 22nd Street, adjacent to the site of its future freestanding building at 542 West 22nd Street.

Conceived upon photography’s inherent potential to meld images of the world with the idiosyncrasies of the creative mind, “Changed: The Altered Photograph,” an exhibition co-curated by Frank Maresca and David Winter, presents a sweeping compendium of works bridging more than 150 years. Pulled from diverse provenance, techniques, and genres—from the dawn of the field to modern art, from anonymous vernacular pieces to avant-garde and pop art, and culminating in compellingly dissimilar contemporary oeuvres—the works here collected deviate resolutely, both aesthetically and ideologically, from the notion of the photographic imprint as a “clean” or objective depiction of visual truth. Furthermore, they offer sharp insights into the history of the medium—its experimental spirit—and glimpses of a possible, albeit capricious, alternative narrative of cultural history.
This trip down the camera obscura rabbit hole starts, paradoxically, with an absent portrait; a cut paper silhouette of a female profile with an abstracted torso placed over an image-less daguerreotype plate—both layers stacked in the original frame. This object, dating ca. 1845-60, is symbolic of how photography added strata of complexity to the role of portraiture in identity. Within the rigid Victorian outline, the vacant surface becomes a mirror that returns the image of the viewer, a presence always shifting and pointing to the medium’s nuclear illusion: the instant eternally suspended. Henceforth, selected early portraits (dating back to ca. 1890 and ca. 1920) glare back at us from the ambivalent threshold between that first photographic exposure and the tender, or sometimes conspicuous, touch of the human hand.
In two dual portraits, conceivably of two sisters and two brothers posing in rather enigmatic circumstances (the girls clasping hands around a cascading fabric; the two young men facing each other in front of a slightly open curtain concealing no discernable background), the added tracings and highlights dissolve and reemerge as our eye wanders. This confluence of fact and fiction also occurs in two dignified likenesses of black women. The delicate sfumatos, the contouring or sharpening of their features, and the striking sculptural quality in the dress one of them is wearing—together with the inexplicable patch in her forehead—all imbue life and visual interest into originally low-contrast prints made with giant sunlight enlargers. Something similarly captivating occurs in the image of two baseball players (their iconic specificity heightened by the painterly details and the dreamlike foggy background) and the photo-collage of a soldier, which strikes as an apparition, emerging with his cap and shotgun from a blotchy airbrushed peacock-blue background. This work’s multidimensionality—with its added photos of people, plausibly involved in the soldier’s backstory, and seed packet cut-outs bearing rose variety illustrations—accentuates its status as a commemorative item and a psychological dimension often elusive in photography. However much the additions and enhancements made to these works responded to the technical constraints of the medium’s infancy, their moody and mysterious patina is both the essence of their “vintage” and contemporary appeal; their eloquence as deliberate, autonomous objects.
“Changed,” also includes altered photographs incorporated into works of graphic design, advertisement, and media from the 1920s to the 1950s; pictures fabricated for practical ends, to evoke feelings and associations, to convey humor and irony or add visual commentary. This chapter comprises a series of illustrations from a hardware catalogue; a mechanical menagerie of sorts, consisting of single photographs of diverse metal parts painted over to make them more realistic in color and volume, creating a contrast with the flat, untouched backdrop that reminds us of Magritte’s conceptual usage of trompe l’oeil. Also included is a rare collage, produced by the Paris advertising agency Éditions Paul-Martial. With its contrasting exposures and surreal treatment of space and nautical forms—and removed from what may have been a brochure, poster, or magazine ad—this work becomes profoundly evocative. This diverse segment concludes with two bodies of work rooted in mass media: that of editorial cartoonist Vaughn Shoemaker, who used photographic reportage as an interactive basis for his character John Q. Public (debuted in The Chicago Daily News) and Arthur Fellig’s (i.e. Weegee’s) lampooning distortions of Marilyn Monroe. Through Weegee’s mastery with lens and darkroom manipulation, Monroe’s presence and her surroundings become malleable substances—the artist stretches an arm here, a leg there, thickens the torso, or multiplies the subject’s always smiling face. These alterations approach the psychedelic language of funhouse mirror reflections and stand in stark contrast against Weegee’s earlier “straight” photography of crime and urban life.
As we move ahead into the 20th Century, notions of anonymity, celebrity, and notoriety are further interconnected with the many ways in which ready-made images have been appropriated, decontextualized, and transformed. In Marcel Duchamp’s “Wanted: $2,000 Reward” (1960), the artist procured a spoof announcement from 1923, designed for the amusement of tourists, and altered it by gluing two dark headshots of himself and adding his alter ego Rrose Sélavy to the already extensive catalogue of aliases listed. “For information leading to the arrest of George W. Welch. alias Bull, alias Pickens. etcetery, etcetery,” reads the text in urgent tabloid style: “Operated Bucket Shop in New York under name HOOKE, LYON and CINQUER” it continues, hinting at a kind of perpetual displacement of identity. This fixing and unfixing of individuality is also present in the hermetic “Man in Box” (ca. 1960s), of unknown authorship: a photograph of a free standing open box enclosing the photo of a man dressed in white covered by a piece of obscure glass. The instant recognition of a dandy complexion is immediately confounded by the non-specificity of the blurred details; a comforting sense of three-dimensionality undermined by an ultimate flatness.
On the other side of the spectrum is Andy Warhol’s “Most Wanted Man No. 11, John Joseph H., Jr.” (1964), a screen print involved in the creation of a 20-foot mural, suitably titled (after a NYPD booklet) with the double entendre “13 Most Wanted Men.” The naked face in the mugshot, picked in the wrong circumstances from the dark mass of anonymity, transforms through the artist’s vision into a James Dean-type character in a plausible poster of a film (never) titled “N.Y.C POLICE / 369 857 …” Warhol’s mural—consisting of the enlarged photos of all 13 wanted felons—was covered with silver paint only 48 hours after its unveiling by order of Governor Nelson Rockefeller. We can find the flip side of such political censorship in the dogmatic overtones of a woven tapestry based on a popular photograph of Mao Zedong playing ping pong. The original photo was taken by the Chairman’s full-time personal photographer Lü Houmin, a fact that underscores the role of staged and replicated photographic images as emblems of propagandistic historical narratives—and otherwise echoes “ping pong diplomacy,” or the rekindling of American-Chinese relations in the 1970s.
Altered photographs from the 1970s to the present indicate a gradual tendency to disguise, deconstruct, and dissociate images from their original contexts or obliterate referents altogether. In Dieter Roth’s “Düsseldorf” and “Heidelberg” pieces (from his “German Cities” series), the artist reproduced photographic postcards of landmarks in a grid. The very concrete and mundane imagery was then painted over with semitransparent solid colors—save for the shape of a single monument that appears superimposed to the different views. Barry Le Va’s photo-collages add spray-painted layers of abstraction onto already abstruse images of African artifacts. Gerald Slota’s literal and figurative scratching, cutting, burning, or piercing through the photographic chimera, speaks of the postmodern tendency to expose the artifice built-into all representational systems. Galerie Gugging’s Leopold Strobl and Johannes Lechner (alias Lejo) construct mentally charged settings that are reflections of nothing but the artists’ minds. Strobl utilizes photographs in printed media to create hybrid works with naturalistic pictorial facets such as texture, three-dimensionality, and depth of field merged into his very distinct sense of perspective and use of abstract volumes. Inspired by found photographs of nameless people, Lejo creates multilayered collages with visual analogies and juxtapositions that evoke the fortuitous associations and the dislocations of memory.
Whether “intervened” or not, all photographic images seem to exist in the land of make-believe, and perhaps—despite art’s finest efforts—reality is not a thing to capture but to be created. “Changed,” hence reaches its conceptual apex with Ellen Carey’s subject-less “Pull with Mixed and Off-Set Pods” (color positive and negative prints, 2011): non-representational photographs made with a large format Polaroid 20 x 24 camera. Mixing and off-setting the Polaroid pods—or the envelopes that hold the dyes—Carey creates novel color combinations and irregular shapes within the “pulls,” a verb turned into a noun to denote these vertical abstract shapes. The artist’s Polaroid practice transcends the picture/sign duality and, in her words: “frees the image from the centuries long tyranny of something to be captured.” The process thus becomes the subject, and we return to the foundation of photography as a “drawing with light,” or to the very beginning of this journey and the latent image that never was.

New York… Beginning 10 November 2016, Hauser & Wirth is pleased to present ‘KLINE RAPE’, an exhibition of new paintings by Rita Ackermann at the gallery’s new temporary home at 548 West 22nd Street. The exhibition will feature two bodies of work by the artist: Stretcher Bar Paintings and the KLINE RAPE series. ‘KLINE RAPE’ will also feature a performance by Ieva Misevičiūte, a new, site-specific work inspired by Ackermann’s paintings. Performances will take place within the exhibition.

Gean Moreno on the work of Rita Ackermann
There is no ideal compositional balance or aim sought to guide the effort, no external metric to judge the work’s success. It’s only the experimentation, which much to do with cumulative effects as with negational gestures and undermining, with the piling up of contradictory elements and disjunctions, that slowly congeals into something. Whatever tension and affective charge the work ends up with is intrinsic to its development. A machine that ruthlessly disorganizes its own forms and tears itself from expectation. Her paintings feel as if they can turn themselves into intense field of tension by dismantling incessantly whatever forms and materials are applied to them. Disjunction and incommensurability animate them. They’ve arrived at a strange threshold of production: they seem to make themselves. In fact, each is a testament to Ackermann’s tenacious catching up to them and the work’s indefatigable drive to push on, to stay ahead of the body that makes them.

Ackermann’s Stretcher Bar Paintings take their title from the emergence of x-ray-like imprints which surface when impressions of paint and pigment become transpired with the structural presence of the picture plane itself. Rather than correcting the effect, Ackermann has decided to embrace this anomaly, forging the series after their disadvantage. Proportionate to the human body, the synthesization of such attributes form fractured compositions whereby background and foreground collapse; a painting revealing only as much as it conceals. Generating polarity charged by forms in opposition; Ackermann’s KLINE RAPE paintings merge the masculinity of Franz Kline’s iconic expressionism with provocatively sensual lines that signal the universal feminine. Suggesting concurrent discord and reconciliation, the artist’s sinuous colors and expansive brushstrokes envelope an engagement of both form and allusion. Nevertheless, the images of Ackermann’s KLINE RAPE provokes immediate readability as ubiquitous common signage.

Cassina Projects and ARTUNER are pleased to announce Figure of Speech, a new exhibition opening on November 10th, 2016 at Cassina Projects. This is the second chapter of a joint exhibition programme between the two ventures.

Figure of Speech is a three-person show featuring the work of David Czupryn, Georg Herold and Katja Seib. A ‘figure of speech’ is a rhetorical device that enriches text with complex layers of significance: it can be a specific arrangement or omission of words, a particular kind of repetition, or a departure from the words’ literal meaning. Some of the most commonly used ones are simile, metaphor, hyperbole, and personification. The use of such devices often refines text by means of bringing sentiments closer to the everyday, or conversely by elevating simple experiences. This exhibition looks at the practices of three contemporary German artists affiliated with the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Specifically, it explores the ways in which each of them articulates the characters within the different narratives weaved into their works. Indeed, in a way similar to the use of a figure of speech in verbal discourse, Czupryn, Herold and Seib evoke, through the protagonists of their paintings, a plethora of references and affects.

David Czupryn’s investigations of nature and artificiality merge with uncannily human emotions in his works on canvas. Personal episodes and dark stories take the shape of disquieting anthropomorphic assemblages of plants and plastics, polymers and minerals. Not interested in a faithful reproduction of nature as such, Czupryn’s alchemies mould the fantastic universes of his paintings in an illusionistic amalgamation of materials. Unlike the composite portraits by the 16th century Italian Master Giuseppe Archimboldo, upon closer inspection, Czupryn’s components – executed with hyperrealist detail – reveal themselves as unreal, non-existent, and otherworldly. The concurrent presence and absence of his characters – unnerving wallflowers quietly observing the audience – allows the artist to explore the uncanny and the unconscious.

Georg Herold is one of the most important German artists of the 20th century, best known for his sculptures made of a various range of materials – from bricks, bottles, wooden laths and underwear to bronze – as well as, at the other end of the spectrum, his caviar paintings, made by painstakingly arranging and numbering thousands of the precious black eggs on canvas. In Figure of Speech, the artist will present both his monumental humanoid bronze sculptures and the signature caviar paintings. Herold is resolved to interpreting the world according to his own canons: instead of asking questions to others, he seeks to question phenomena directly. It is essential for him to keep as unbound as possible from existing associations. Indeed, the caviar paintings are an investigation into displaced materials, into luxury and mortality, created with a substance that is simultaneously precious and degradable. The sculptures, on the other hand, embody the struggle between the maker and his creation, between desire and wish-fulfilment.

Katja Seib’s paintings delve into narrative emotions. They open like doors onto private scenes of tenderness, desire, sadness or reverie. Always somewhat mysterious, her works hold the promise of disclosing their secrets hidden in the details. They articulate ineffable feelings that are at once personal and universal. Often metaphorical, Seib’s painterly stories reflect with self-irony on the human condition in its infinite declinations. For her body of work presented in New York, unlike the one preceding it, the artist looks towards current events from the world at large, rather than at personal experiences. However, by portraying friends and people she feels close to, Seib brings such occurrences closer to an intimate dimension. Some, like the death of the legendary musician Prince, are moments that blur the boundaries between public and private, as they touch us deeply, without concerning us directly.

David Czupryn (b. 1983) is a German-born artist who lives and works in Düsseldorf. He graduated from the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie (2007–2015) where he studied sculpture under Georg Herold and painting under Lucy McKenzie and Tomma Abts. His work has been shown throughout Europe including Maschinen Haus, Essen, Kunstmuseum Solingen, Düsseldorf, Londonnewcastle Projectspace and Marlborough Contemporary in London. He participated in two spotlight exhibitions in 2016 on ARTUNER. This year he won the 70th International Bergische Art Prize.

Georg Herold (b. 1947) was born in Jena, East Germany. He now lives and works in Cologne. Herold studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich (1974-1976) and the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg (1977-1978). He holds professorships in Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Düsseldorf. One of the most renowned German artists of the last thirty years, Herold has shown throughout Europe and the US since 1977. He has had solo and two person exhibitions at institutions such as at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Museum Brandhorst, München, the Kunstverein, Freiburg and at galleries such as Max Hetzler, Berlin, CFA, Berlin, Sadie Coles, London and The Modern Institute, Glasgow. His broad oeuvre, which covers sculpture, installation, photography, painting and video, has had a major influence on artists throughout Europe.

Katja Seib (b. 1989) was born in Düsseldorf, Germany where she lives and works. She received an MFA in painting and studied as a ‘Meisterschüler’ under Professor Tomma Abts. Her work has been exhibited in several German galleries including the KIT Museum in Düsseldorf, Parkhaus Düsseldorf Gallery, Fiebach Minninger Gallery, Cologne and Londonnewcastle Projectspace in London. She took part in a 2016 spotlight exhibition on ARTUNER.

"Symbiosis, not chance mutation, is the driving force behind evolution. The cooperation between organisms and the environment are the chief agents of natural selection—not competition among individuals. Darwin’s grand vision was not wrong, only incomplete.”

Lynn Margulis, American evolutionary theorist

Without bio-mass, molecular genetics, and costly research laboratories, Karin Pliem attempts to convey her ideas and perspectives concerning the problematic relationship between man and living nature. By seducing the viewer into a massive landscape, replete with fantastical planting and vestiges of long past manufacture, She holds that man is neither more nor less than a part of nature. Symbiotic Union, Pliem’s first exhibition in the United States, invites us to enter a world of constructive communication between a polyculture society’s various living organisms. Although humankind is not depicted, we, as the viewer finalize the pictorial plane. There can be no doubt that the Artist’s views of nature are not naturalistic.

When comparing works of art and organisms, the philosopher Wolfgang Welsch notes a possible parallel between artistic and evolutionary creations. “We cannot take away or exchange some part of it without causing the most serious damage. The orientation of works of art toward consistency is perfectly analog to the biotic tendency toward the generation of optimized entities. It is in this structural sense that art always emulates nature.” Pliem’s canvas construct is broken down into panels which are united through a single-color palette and thread of decay and rebirth.

Just as with symbiotic connections between living beings from different ecosystems and regions of the world, the works in Symbiotic Union create a conversation between conceptual considerations and the painterly process. At a moment in which the painting achieves dialogue with past and present concerns, Pleim knows the work is finished. This ending process is also one that happens organically and is spurred on with the immediate beginning of the next painting in the series and so on…. her world knows more than just one symbiotic union.

Initiated as part of the inaugural Immersion: A French American Photography Commission, a program launched by the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès in alliance with Aperture Foundation, Eden is the first iteration of artist Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques’s eponymous long-term project. As part of the commission, Couzinet-Jacques purchased a small, historical building in Eden, North Carolina, as a site for an immersive exploration of the ideas of property, community, and image-making. The resultant output is eclectic, incorporating Polaroids, video, traditional photographic film, found objects, historical documents, and sculptural elements—the better to articulate and grapple with the often contradictory themes of utopia and home, the inevitable gaps between representation and reality, and the work of art as a means of re-enchantment. In addition to his own visual investigations, Couzinet-Jacques invited a group of sculptors, writers, videographers, and other artists to visit Eden over the course of the year and to create work inspired by the Little Red Schoolhouse. Selections of the resulting work, including pieces from each of the participants and elements from the house itself, are interwoven as part of this ambitious building and greenhouse installation, designed in collaboration with architects Jérémie Dalin and Sylvia Bourgoin and with environmental guidance by NY Sun Works, an urban sustainability non-profit organization.

Skoto Gallery is pleased to present a selection of new paintings by William Engel and glass sculpture Jeremy Silva. This is the third exhibition by William Engel and first by Jeremy Silva at the gallery. The reception is on Thursday, December 8th, 6-8 pm.

William Engel’s work speaks a multilayered language that is at once personal and full of thoughtful inclusion, characterized by carefully organized rhythm of organic forms, mastery of the nuances of color and composition as well as a display of emotional intensity. As an artist who constantly interrogates what he sees, he strives to shape and reshape the basis of his art as well as impress upon us a sense of adventure and discovery. A prolonged viewing of his work is often richly rewarded as even what seems a restful background of his invented landscapes becomes an imaginary charged space of incredible tension in which the planes are subtly but sharply de-centered. His work evokes a poetic intimacy that allows the past to be continually revealed through the present. William Engel is a long-time faculty member of the New York School of Interior Design who has exhibited nationally since 1979 in numerous shows including the Friends Gallery at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. He teaches Advanced Color at NYSID, a course that he wrote and has collaborated with several New York interior designers such as In Situ Design, Lilian B. Interiors, Richard Keith Langham, Charles Pavarini III, Robert Kaner Design, Ageloff Associates, and produced commissioned works of art for their site specific residencies in NYC, the Hamptons and clients across the country. His work has been installed in the Corporate lobby of Time Warner on Columbus Circle, New York and in the collection of Shering-Plough Headquarters, New Jersey, the NY School of Interior Design and the William Hotel in Manhattan, where he was commissioned to do seven works for the floors of the hotel. InSitu Design and Lilian B designed the hotel based on his work. His first book Portfolio Design for Interiors, co-authored with Harold Linton of George Mason University is scheduled for Spring 2017 with Bloomsbury London/Fairchild, New York.

Born from a desire to return to one’s paradise is, Honua, Hawaiian for Earth. Honua is artist Jeremy Silva’s effortless attempt to capture the essence of life on the Big Island of Hawai’I and to share its majesty. Jeremy was born and raised in Hawai’I where he witnessed firsthand the dramatic play among land, sea and air. At times, Honua would seem to release a vociferous cry of agitation for the stinging waves against black staccato landscape of volcanic remains, while at other times , the lapping water calmed the blue sun-slumbering shore at which Honua would seem to rejoice in mellifluous serenity. This ever-changing environment had a lasting impression on the artist even after he moved to New York more than thirteen years ago. The creation of Honua by Jeremy marks the passionate return to and pays homage to a sometimes forgotten nature. His pieces come into being with specially selected materials that conjure up visions of island life. The bulbosa air plant with its outreaching arms becomes the tentacles of a mysterious sea creature nestled in coral and driftwood, naked and scarred , takes on the form of a dancing whale. Each hand-blown glass vessel represents the enormity of earth’s power and the fine balance between peace and tumult, organic and structural, the known and the unexpected found in the realms of nature. And each piece is its own vision, welcoming viewers to explore, linger and return, only to explore again.

Leila Heller Gallery New York is pleased to present “Zaha Hadid,” an exhibition featuring the oeuvre of the late internationally renowned architect Dame Zaha Hadid. On view will be works spanning from a breadth of Hadid’s designs including pieces from the 2015 Liquid Glacial Collection of furniture.

From the MAXXI Museum in Rome to the London Olympic Aquatics Stadium, from the Guangzhou Opera House to the Sheikh Zayed Bridge in Abu Dhabi, over the last 30 years Hadid has engaged with architecture as a form of landscape painting, transforming the hard-geometry of 20th century vertical aspirations into a site specific horizontal reflection of multi-perspectival design, heralding a new era along the way. For this exhibition, the hallmarks of these large scale building projects and grand architecture reveal themselves in the architect’s use of a new spatial paradigm at all scales, and in a myriad of materials resulting in a multitude of forms of domestic reverie.

On the occasion of this exhibition, Leila Heller Gallery presents various bodies of Hadid’s design work, exemplifying her transition after the 1990s from an ‘early semi-tectonic’ into her ‘later semi-liquid’ phase. The architect’s transposition of the vertical and horizontal can be seen in the angular Seoul desk (2008), composed in high gloss fiberglass. Made from sustainably-sourced American walnut and hand-finished to a seamless surface, the Volu table (2015), is conceived as a dinning pavilion with curved components and is shaped further by typological, functional and ergonomic considerations. Hadid’s ethic of deep environmental and physical inter-connectedness is exemplified in the Visio vases (2014), whose intricate pleats seek to portray the complexity of liquid form.

Hadid’s work in design presents a 21st century evolution towards iconic folds and organic forms, as well as an exploration of scale, innovation, and materiality: from the delicately tactile to the high-gloss industrial. These signature elements in the evolution of a gesture translate into lyrical condensations in the interior, domestic, or personal space.

NEW YORK – De Buck Gallery is pleased to announce an upcoming exhibition of works by acclaimed Japanese Gutai master Shozo Shimamoto. The exhibition, entitled Do Something Interesting, See Something Odd will be on view at the gallery from November 3, 2016 through January 28, 2017, and an opening reception will be held at the gallery on Thursday, November 3 from 6-8 PM.

Do Something Interesting, See Something Odd, delves ever deeper into Shimamoto’s revolutionary career trajectory, incorporating works dating from the 1960s Gutai period through the artist’s death in 2013. The exhibition provides an overview of the maturation of Shimamoto’s style and technique. Centerpieces include examples of his trademark Bottle Crash series, in which the artist created lively, abstract paint-smattered works by ceremoniously throwing bottles and other containers full of pigment at otherwise blank canvases, highlighting the innovative performance-based methods and the energy, visually documented within the works, with which Shimamoto approached his art over the course of his lengthy career. Pieces such as the 2011 Untitled (Ping Pong), which incorporates islands of ping pong balls across the surface of the canvas, exemplify a characteristic playfulness and desire to push the limits of what is possible in art that embodies the very spirit of Gutai, and of Shimamoto’s work and life.

Following an encounter with the elder artist Jiro Yoshihara as a young man, Shozo Shimamoto quickly became an integral member of Yoshihara’s Gutai group, the key artistic movement in a recovering post-war Japan. Yoshihara’s call to “do what has never been done” in art, inspired Shimamoto and his young compatriots to experiment and thereby create ground-breaking artwork that in many ways calls to mind the performative Happenings that began to pop up in the United States and Europe during the same period of the 1950s and 1960s. Following the dissolution of Gutai in the early 1970s, Shimamoto became a pioneer of the Mail Art movement, as well as an ambassador of peace, even being recognized as a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996.

Born in Osaka in 1928, Shimamoto’s importance in the Gutai movement has been honored in exhibitions at prominent institutions including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), the Centre Pompidou (Paris), and multiple editions of the Venice Biennale. His work is also represented in the permanent collections of the Tate Modern (London), the Rachofsky House (Dallas), and the Osaka Museum of Art. Shozo Shimamoto passed away in 2013 at the age of 85.

For press inquiries, please contact the gallery at info@debuckgallery.com or 212-255-5735. For sales inquiries, please contact the gallery at collect@debuckgallery.com.

On the occasion of the exhibition Shozo Shimamoto: Do Something Interesting, See Something Odd, an exhibition catalogue is published, featuring an essay by curator Yoshio Kato, with special Thanks to Whitestone Gallery, Shozo Shimamoto Association, and shimamotoLAB Inc.

Galerie Lelong is pleased to present Burning all illusion, Samuel Levi Jones’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Known for deconstructing institutional and academic books as a gesture of challenging historical and contemporary power structures, Jones unveils new paintings that incorporate found texts on black history, law and higher education.

Through the abstraction of book covers into compelling compositions, Jones explores the disillusionment of the very systems the volumes represent. Several works are comprised of desecrated law books, articulating the artist’s resolute perspective on the flawed American justice system. One of the central works in the exhibition, Talk to Me (2015), is a monumental, multi-panel composition comprised of law books, whose scale and impact powerfully interrogates the justice system’s limitations for certain groups. Jones is not solely focused on the violent confrontations with the law that continue to make headlines, but rather the injustices that go unreported. Seeking out narratives of individuals overlooked by society and the media, Jones creates works that resemble quilts, a craft long associated with collaborative storytelling. The new painting Burning all illusion (2016) brings together several reference books of various colors and themes into a patchwork with loose threads and rough edges, prompting open-ended questions about the recorded and unrecorded histories of our collective experience.

Jones builds upon a movement within abstract painting that prioritizes formal investigations while also addressing social and cultural issues. Using a process that recalls radical forms of art that employ detritus and everyday found materials, Jones reveals the social discrimination at play in how value is assigned to different cultures and the objects that represent them. Through his process of simultaneously preserving evidence of the texts through their bindings while erasing the content, Jones re-examines history and generates new perspectives from which to grapple with society’s ongoing ignorance and apathy.

Born in Marion, Indiana, Samuel Levi Jones now lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. Jones completed a private residency program in Northern California in summer of 2016, during which he produced new work for the exhibition from books deaccessioned by the Department of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Recent museum exhibitions include After Fred Wilson at the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art and Unbound at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. His work is included in museum and public collections such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Rubell Family Collection, Miami; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. In 2014, Jones was the recipient of the Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize, an annual award given to an emerging or mid-career African-American artist.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Galerie Lelong will hold an artist talk moderated by Sara Reisman, Artistic Director for The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, on Saturday, December 10, 2-4pm.

An exhibition of architectural models by Hariri and Hariri Architecture in conversation with gallery artists opens at Nancy Hoffman on December 15, 2016 and continues through January 28, 2017. For the first time, Nancy Hoffman Gallery will show architectural models in juxtaposition to works by gallery artists.

“Dialogues” came about as a result of my visit to Hariri and Hariri Architecture’s offices, where models, created over the years, are readily viewable. The models are not simply architectural models, practical proposals for projects, residential, commercial, etc. These are models with a vision. Each is a work of art, made with tender loving care over months; each is artful, intriguing, inspiring and stimulating. Each exemplary of the firm’s vision to “create places of contemplation, places that incorporate time and memory, in which there is a sense of a passage or a journey.”

I was stimulated by the visuals in the models and how several of them were like a melody to songs
by gallery artists. A model for a building constructed like a bridge, Fog Habitat proposed for The Embarcadero in San Francisco, called to mind Don Eddy’s recent paintings of the bridges of New York, such as Metal City. Hariri and Hariri Architecture’s unconventional lighthouse, Beacon of Light, a stone, glass and steel sculpture struck a chord with Sarah Bridgland Constructions on paper of balsa wood, paint, construction board and oil pastel. The model for “Mobius Strip Hybrid Stair” echoed Ilan Averbuch’s The Tower and the Snail, a sculpture with a tower not unlike the spiral of the staircase. Visual parallels.

Rather than address the topic of art and architecture didactically or historically, this exhibition is a visual celebration of the communality of form as it moves from architecture to painting, from architecture to sculpture, from architecture to drawing.

Hariri & Hariri Architecture is a New York based architecture and design firm established in 1986 by Iranian-born Cornell-educated sisters Gisue Hariri and Mojgan Hariri. For three decades, they have focused on a holistic approach to design ranging from master planning and architecture to interior design, furniture, lighting, product design and jewelry. The firm’s approach is rooted in the belief that design is fundamental to improving the quality of life. With an integrated, unified approach architecture can become a total work of art. The Hariris’ fascination with organic forms and faceted geometry of rocks, crystals and geological formations has resulted in a series of award winning architectural projects, product, lighting, furniture and a jewelry line.

In March 2006 Rizzoli published Hariri & Hariri Houses, the firm’s second monograph, with a foreword by Richard Meier and an introduction by Paul Goldberger. In 2010 The Images Publishing Group published Hariri & Hariri – Buildings & Projects.

Sopheap Pich: Rang Phnom Flower, taking place from December 8, 2016, through February 4, 2017, will mark the debut of Tyler Rollins Fine Art’s newly expanded gallery space and will feature Sopheap Pich’s large scale Rang Phnom Flower sculpture. Around 25 feet in length and extremely complex in its construction, the work is Pich’s most ambitious single-form sculpture to date. It was first exhibited in early 2016 at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, in For the Love of Things: Still Life, where it was shown alongside works by artists ranging from Picasso to Warhol and Mapplethorpe, selected predominantly from the museum’s renowned collection. At Tyler Rollins Fine Art, it will be presented together with new, smaller scale works by Pich that explore the same flower motif.

The works in the exhibition are all inspired by the vine-like flower clusters of the cannonball tree (“rang phnom” in Khmer), which has a strong cultural resonance within Cambodian culture and a personal significance for the artist. In Southeast Asia it is associated with the sal tree under which Buddha was born, and it is often planted near Buddhist temples. In fact, however, it originated in the Americas and was introduced by Europeans to Sri Lanka, where it was soon revered for its resemblance to the sal tree, which does not grow in tropical climates. It was then brought to Southeast Asia by Sri Lankans, who were responsible for the revitalization of Buddhism in that region. Many cannonball trees can be found around the Buddhist temples near Pich’s studio on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, and he became fascinated with the muscular, architectonic qualities of the flowers, as well as the sensuously flowing lines of the vines. His monumental Rang Phnom Flower sculpture is composed of hundreds of strands of rattan and bamboo shaped into interlocking grids and circular elements, the precise geometry of which contrasts strongly with the baroque contortions of the vegetal forms. Rendered in an enormously oversized scale, the flowers and vines dwarf the viewer, confronting him with the mesmerizing beauty and overwhelming power of nature. The work follows up on Pich’s widely exhibited 2011 Morning Glory sculpture, now in the permanent collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which was featured in his solo exhibitions at Tyler Rollins Fine Art (2011) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2013), and also shown at the Guggenheim Bilbao and Singapore’s Centre for Contemporary Art.

Pich is widely considered to be Cambodia’s most internationally prominent contemporary artist. Born in Battambang, Cambodia, in 1971, he moved with his family to the United States in 1984. After receiving his MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999, he returned to Cambodia in 2002, where he began working with local materials – bamboo, rattan, burlap from rice bags, beeswax and earth pigments gathered from around Cambodia – to make sculptures inspired by bodily organs, vegetal forms, and abstract geometric structures. Pich’s childhood experiences during the genocidal conditions of late 1970s Cambodia had a lasting impact on his work, informing its themes of time, memory, and the body. His sculptures stand out for their subtlety and power, combining refinement of form with a visceral, emotive force. His work has been featured in numerous international museum exhibitions and biennials in Asia, Europe, Australia, and the United States. His Wall Reliefs series debuted in a room sized installation at Documenta in 2012; and other biennials include the Moscow Biennale (2013), Dojima River Biennial (2013), Singapore Biennale (2011), Asian Art Biennial (2011), Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale (2009), and the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (2009). His highly acclaimed solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, entitled Cambodian Rattan: The Sculptures of Sopheap Pich, was the museum’s first solo show given to a contemporary Southeast Asian artist. According to Art in America, the exhibition “can be regarded as a cameo retrospective, since its 10 works accurately reflect the range of the artist’s motifs from 2005 to late 2012.”

Pich’s work is included in such major museum collections as: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; M+, Museum for Visual Culture, Hong Kong; Singapore Art Museum; Queensland Art Gallery; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Reviews and feature articles about Pich have appeared in such publications as Artforum, Art in America, ArtNews, Art Newspaper, Asian Art News, Flash Art, New York Times, Orientations, Wall Street Journal. In 2014, Art Asia Pacific called Pich “the Southeast Asian artist to watch at the moment.”